Let the games begin

Fifa’08

I am not a football fan but talk about ice hockey or major league baseball and I’ll be somewhat interested. So, when it came to picking a football team I was clueless. We had to pick teams from the same league. My opponent chose to play EPL or as I learnt now called Barclay’s League so I chose Chelsea. Why? I recently bought a Chelsea jersey and matching shorts from a trip in Hong Kong at the Ladies Market. It had the number 8 on it and I thought my son would like the outfit. As the lucky 8 would have it I won my match in overtime penalties. I think all the other games went into penalties.

Need For Speed: Pro Street

Moving on to Need For Speed…I like racing games but I am more a fan of Rally driving over street or circuit. The last time I had seen NFS and actually played it was Need for Speed II with my Pentium II and my 3dfx Voodoo card. I thought I sucked big time in NFS: Pro Street but at least I finished – 3rd in my heat of 4 competitors. Many of the first group ended up with a DNF and one from my heat also DNF. I’m guessing that helped me with my overall score.

Check out the concentration

Crysis

I watched the Instant Action of the first group of 4 players and was watching Linda play. She looked like she was kicking some serious ass. I recalled she said something like, "..this is like BF.." and then took to picking up the scoped rifle and what looked like a zoom in for a head shot. Geez! Luckily it wasn’t going to be a playoff scenario where winners from each group played each other. It was kills and deaths that would tally the score and also if you came out on top.

I squared off against my competitors and must admit that I’ve been a Quaker, Duker (Duke Nukem), and Half-Life player on and off. Never been too hooked and played all nighters. So, I knew my way around the A,W,S,D but was not sure about Crysis. So, I took about 5 to 10 minutes to read through the manual that was available while waiting on the first batch to complete their onslaught. I had seen these cool new features – invisibility, power, armour, speed. The other team was busy using the wheel mouse to activate and that seemed a little cumbersome for in the heat of battle I want all concentration on my mouse movement. I found out that there are keys bound to activate the specific suit functions by a double tap. I also found out that you can change the firing mode of the weapon from Auto to Single or switch to a secondary firing mode by pressing the ‘x’ key. A little more reading and I found that there was a little radar display that showed the approximate location of the opponent when they gave away their position by firing a weapon.

My turn came and I sat down in front of the Acer machine, take a look at this case, it looks like something out of the Transformers movie.

I familiarised myself with the keyboard and the mouse. The game was on and I ran through picking up a different weapon and proceeded to test out the bound keys – double tap…invisibility. Cool! Play it cool and try to find high ground and wait for the other guys to start shooting and then I’ll know just where to go hunting. The action got intense as I tried to wrestle a bit with what was crouch, prone and jump. I got in many kills and less deaths. I finished on top of my group.